Resq TailsThe trials and triumphs of rescued dogs

Layla has been playing around on her booja board and her little tippy plank thing for a while now, so I thought maybe it was time to get out the real teeter and give it a try.

Honestly, I was expecting something along the lines of what Rogue did when she learned the teeter. She just ran as fast as she could to the end and banged that teeter as hard as she could. LOL I think Rogue got satisfaction out of making the teeter hit the ground full speed. In fact, a couple of times she banged it down so hard that it bounced her off, (which amazingly didn’t bother her). Sorry, I’m getting off track here.

Well, Layla’s reaction was nothing like I expected! First, let me say that Layla is not sound sensitive, or motion sensitive. In fact, there really isn’t much that phases her, but something about the teeter was not to her liking. So, I remembered an article in Clean Run about a dog who had developed teeter phobias and how they overcame them, and I decided that instead of trying to coax her along faster than she was comfortable, I’d use the Premack Principle.

Basically stated, Premack is this: In operant conditioning, the Premack principle, developed by David Premack states that a commonly occurring action (one more desirable for the actor) can be used effectively as a reinforcer for a less commonly occurring one (that is, one less desirable for the actor). The example I’ve heard used most is that of child when a parent wants them to clean their room. They are more likely to watch tv…so in order to watch tv, they have to do the less desirable action of cleaning the room. (I hope that makes sense).

In Layla’s case with the teeter today, the likely or reinforcing behavior for her was that she would stay away from the teeter. So, I decided to use that as the reward. It worked something like this: If Layla will look at the teeter I will toss a treat away from it to reward her. Then after that step…I waited, she stepped on the teeter. Again, I tossed the treat away from the teeter. Eventually, she was jumping on the teeter on her own, without me coaxing her.

So here are a couple videos that we got of her first day on the teeter. These are taken after I remembered to grab the camera in the second session of training, so this is after all the initial work to get her more comfortable with the teeter. As you can see, by the end, she was able to go out to the teeter on her own, without coaxing. Yay! We still have a long ways to go, but at least she’s not as anxious as she was in the beginning.